Description: An insurance company starts with an initial surplus, collects premium, pays claims to policyholders and pays dividends to stockholders. What remains is the following year’s surplus. The process continues. This paper describes how to calculate the distribution of surplus for any given year. With these distributions, one can make the calculations of premiums and dividends.

Description: This paper addresses the classification of products according to their accounting standards: SFAS 60 for traditional products, SFAS 97 for interest sensitive products, and SOP 95-1 for participating products. In particular, the question of which products should be classified under the Statement of Position will be addressed. In addition, it will be shown that if a product's dividend formula passes on to the policyholder significantly less than a full asset share an over-reserving problem will occur if the Statement of Position is used as the accounting system.

Description: Traditional mean-variance method does not take skewness of the random rate of return into consideration. It only considers minimum variance for a given acceptable rate of return, which limited the probability of obtaining higher rate of return. If the skewness of return for the portfolio is incorporated into model of traditional approach, then the resulting non-linear programing model is not computational efficient, which certainly is complicated. On the other hand, possibilistic programming provides more efficient techniques to solve the imprecision nature of rate of return and also preserves the original linear model.

Description: In this paper we discuss the link between the price of a contingent claim and its replicating strategies. We compute the replicating strategies for some contingent claims when the price of stocks are modeled using either the Wiener process or the Poisson process. These replicating strategies are essential knowledge if one wishes to implement a dynamic trading strategy.

Description: The Annual Reports of the Trustees, for the Social Security Trust Funds, are cornucopia of data. However, the major focus is on projections expressed as a percentage of payroll. The purpose of this paper is to suggest that additional measures - which would supplement, rather than replace the percentage of payroll data - should be examined to evaluate the projected effect of the cash benefits OASDI program.

Description: This paper presents a multi-state stochastic model for analyzing continuing care retirement community CCRC populations. The model considers CCRCs with a number of independent living units and a skilled nursing facility. Residents may transfer temporarily or permanently to this facility. It is assumed that units vacated by deaths, withdrawals or permanent transfers are immediately occupied by new residents. Transfers are modeled using a time-homogeneous Markov process. The paper provides some probabilistic results and some numerical results obtained using this model. Some important generalizations of the model are also briefly discussed.

Description: This note develops the optimality of the put option as a hedging strategy. For an investor who owns a stock, he can buy a put option to hedge against the downside risk of the stock price. In this short note, we ask two questions with the hedge strategy of the put option. First, whether the investor is better off with the hedging strategy? Second, if the investor is better off with the hedging strategy, whether it is the optimal hedging plan? Our result shows that in a risk averse world an investor will maximize his utility with buying the put option as a hedge strategy.

Description: This paper investigates the use of models of dependent mortality for determining annuity values. We discuss a broad class of parametric models using a bivariate survivorship function called a copula. Using data from a large insurance company to illustrate our methods, we calculate maximum likelihood estimates to calibrate the rnodel.

Description: This paper examines the problem of hedging foreign exchange risk across multiple countries using currency options. The profit target requirement is formulated as a stochastic constraint in the context of a binomial lattice. Models are presented for European options. In a numerical example, five currency options are selected, allowing for long or short positions, depending on the target value.

Description: All claim reserve systems endeavor to derive estimates of the unpaid portion of claims which have been incurred over a given period of time, making use of information on numbers of claims and amounts paid on claims as of the valuation date. In this paper, a claim reserve system is described. While the system does produce the traditional type of single-point estimates of claim reserves, it also provides the user with frequency distributions of claim reserves